acronym and small caps

[Kevin Dunn <kdunn@hsc.edu>]

Apologies for the newbie question, but I'm reading the 1.79.1 xsl stylesheets using eyes that are accustomed to reading dsl. I found the fo/inline.xsl file where acronym is processed. It looks like it just passes its contents through unchanged (which is how it looks in pdf produced by fop, xep and axf). It seems like at a minimum it should render all caps in the next smaller font. At a premium, it should use small caps if the font has them available.

So...I tackled my first xsl customization, and I'm pretty pleased with myself:

<xsl:template match="acronym">

  <fo:inline font-variant="small-caps">

    <xsl:call-template name="inline.charseq"/>

  </fo:inline>

</xsl:template>

This accomplishes nothing with fop or xep, but axf does the right thing: it uses the small cap glyph in the font I am using. And if I set small-caps-emulation-always="true" in the Antenna House options file, axf scales the normal caps instead of using the small caps from the font. The scaled caps look similar to the small caps, but they are different enough that I can tell that axf is using the small cap when it is allowed to.

I'm pretty happy with this. My only real question is whether I reinvented the wheel.